The effects of evolved sociability in a commons dilemma

Abstract

This paper explores the evolution of strategies in an n-player dilemma game. These n-player dilemmas provide a formal representation of many real world social dilemmas. Those social dilemmas include littering, voting and sharing common resources such as sharing computer processing time. This paper explores the evolution of altruism using an n-player dilemma and our results show the importance of sociability in these games. We propose a novel tag-mediated mechanism to allow for n-player interactions. This paper provides an examination of the interaction dynamics that occur in these n-player games when sociability is an evolved trait. Our results show how the agent population changes and evolves rapidly in response to the strategies of their peers in the population. © 2010 Springer.